How do I create a mailing list in EE 3?

This no longer exists in 3. The following via the EL blog:

“Mailinglist module removed. If you are using the Mailinglist module, the update will export your list for you so you can take it to a SaaS solution for mass emailing, like Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Constant Contact, or SendGrid.”

I just found out there is no mailing list in EE 3. The features list for new buyers of EE says it has a double opt in/out mailing list. Someone should take that out of the feature list advertising .

For anyone looking for an office based mailing list solution rather than third party hosted solution, take a look at:

https://www.arclab.com/en/amlc/

The free version only allows a tiny number of subscribers but is good enough for learning/testing to see if its what you’re looking fort.

Sorry for that confusion, Sally, and thanks for the link to another solution. A lot has changed since ExpressionEngine was first created over ten years ago, and these days using the web server to manage transactional and marketing emails is not recommended, so we removed that module.

We highly recommend the SaaS solutions Jeremy mentioned because they have such great reputations for deliverability and helping you maintain a positive reputation for your domain’s email activity.

I put a similar question to Ben Croker from PutYourLightsOn a couple weeks ago, the developer of the great FireMail plugin, and here’s his reply:

“we will be doing something to tackle the lack of the mailing list module in EE3 and hopefully improve on it.”

FireMail is slated for an EE v3 upgrade “in early 2016” according to their roadmap. I understand the desire to push email handling off to a 3rd party transactions/mass email system, but for many small projects, the service price is a put-off. Combine that with having to have technophobe clients who don’t want to learn yet another system like SendGrid or MC or Campaign Monitor, and an in-EE solution can be preferable.

Having been a system admin for many years, and having worked on a variety of different server environments with EE, there clearly are limits to using a system like FireMail with Mailinglists. But for maintaining small lists (under a thousand subscribers or so) there are no major drawbacks, and I have implemented such scenarios successfully. One sticking point usually is a service provider’s policy on emails per/hour limits to prevent spammers from abusing a system.

Interestingly I attempted to push FireMail/Mailinglist to its limits several years ago, and successfully had lists of 15,000 sending perfectly fine, and when I pushed it to 40,000 I did have problems with the servers, some of which were cleared up by tuning MySQL, Apache and PHP. But it still became problematic if the web, email and database servers weren’t all on independent hardware. The worst performance I had was a VPS that kept all three services in one slice of a server.

An easy solution has been for me to maintain the mailinglist function in EE and just use an outfit like SendGrid for smtp sends on a per-email rate. Relatively inexpensive, and requiring no interface between client and third party service provider. They even have a free package (at least used to) sending like 200 emails/month.

Hope this helps others with similar situations!

Mailgun also has a free plan, with a bit more leeway, but I think it’s important that clients understand the difference between transactional and marketing emails. It’s only going to get harder for people to have deliverable marketing email, not easier, so getting them to understand the necessity and value of services that handle marketing emails is important for their current and future success. Is there an expense? Yes, but that’s the case with any advertising, and most services that handle marketing lists are still relatively cheap. Even a small business needs to budget for such expenditures.

For some reason, I didn’t like the Mailgun plan when I looked at it a few years ago, I might have to look at it again. But I get that businesses need to budget for email campaigns. I more am referring to a small nonprofit or business that just wants to send out small announcements, and doesn’t need the full suite of marketing tools.

As EE’s Communicate module still allows sending to member groups, it can still send a lot of emails during a send, it the member group is large. And if an EE install is building a member group through ecommerce, there really isn’t any functional difference, or marketing distinction between sending to that or sending to a Mailinglist.

I agree that marketing email is going to continue to become more difficult to hoop-jump without the assistance of a third party service like Mailgun or Sendgrid, but pretty much unless a business or nonprofit has the capacity to hire someone to implement, manage and run campaigns, the small business and nonprofit are left out. I’ve tried to move several small businesses onto a third party service, but usually the proprietor or directors eyes glaze over when they have to actually use a service with only in-house help, and not outsource it.

We’ll see what Ben comes up with, and I’m more than happy to use add ons to replace lost EE functionality in areas like this with minimal needs. 😉

I’ve saved a few clients thousands over the years by using phplist. The deliverability and open rate has remained steady and is as high as third party services like MailChimp. But I also make sure that we send out emails with solid content and that people are only added to the list with double opt in.